Personal finance, career building, freedom, investing, corporate-dom and the IT industry geek.
My personal adventures in hacking life.

April 23, 2008

The Value of Time.

It isn't in dollars per hour. It isn't in your wage or salary. It's in how much you value yourself.

Here's an experiment, pretend that your time is the most valuable.

Funny things start happening. You start and finish things that matter, you start making other people's time matter, you become angry about wasted time. Here are some changes that come from valuing your time:

You refuse pointless meeting appointments.

You stop surfing the net, you either work or you go home.

You start treating every person you meet with the same intensity and focus, because it's your time at stake. Your measurement of the other person's importance no longer matters, only your time does.

You stop killing time. Scary thought.

You stop hanging out with people who don't care.

You know the difference between up and down time.

Life isn't about getting to Friday. Or 4 weeks of mediocre holidays.

You start planning on how to do better work, but in less time.

The only difference between work time and home time is that you play differently.

You start calling the CEO first. Chris Gardner started at Dean Witter Reynolds (American stock broker) and was given a client staff list, his manager said 'call every single one and offer our products'. Most brokers start at the bottom of the list, and don't call the CEO. Chris wasn't 'most brokers' and knew that by calling the CEO and scoring a meeting, he saved himself time. Chris Gardner knew the first rule of valuing his time, even at the bottom of the laddder. He's now worth squillions, and you might have seen his movie The Pursuit of Happyness.

Imagine all the remarkable people and businesses there would be if just a few started valuing time differently and started focusing on being awesome. I'll wager that people already doing this aren't worried about money. That's because remarkable businesses want someone remarkable.